Today Microsoft launched Windows Azure, its platform for cloud computing. Microsoft will use the Azure platform to run its own web applications and will also open the platform to developers for building and running their own applications. Acording Microsoft:

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

We have an interesting scenario: Azure will compete with other cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, or force.com.

More information can be found at Microsoft’s Azure site and in this technical white paper.

As you know GoGrid is an alternative cloud platform to the likes of Amazon. GoGrid do publish an API that lets you get at all their controls through a REST based web service. This lets you create your own calls and get moving with it very quickly.  GoGrid give you a $50 free credit, so you can play about with their system at no cost.

This week I attendend the “Network Society: Social changes, organizations and citizens” event organized in Barcelona .  We had an excellent programme and speakers . With about 200 people attending the event, the event tryed to create a valuable “brain storming” for all those interested in the analysis of the changes that our society faces and the role of technology and culture in the whole set.

The term Network Society (extracted from wikipedia) was coined by Jan van Dijk in his Dutch book De Netwerkmaatschappij (1991) (The Network Society) (1999, 2006), and by Manuel Castells in The Network Society, the first part of his trilogy The Information Age (1996). In 1978 James Martin used the related term ‘The Wired Society’ indicating a society that is connected by mass- and telecommunication networks. Barry Wellman and the team of Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff also have done work on the concept of network society. Van Dijk defines the network society as a society in which a combination of social and media networks shapes its prime mode of organization and most important structures at all levels (individual, organizational and societal). He compares this type of society to a mass society that is shaped by groups, organizations and communities (’masses’) organized in physical co-presence.

This course was an opportunity to create  an open and critical conversation about the so-called “network society”.The speakers of the event were:

• Andrew Rasiej
• Carlos Domingo
• Carol Darr
• Enrique Dans
• Ethan Zuckerman
• Gumersindo Lafuente
• Irene Mia
• Josu Jon Imaz
• Juan Freire
• Miquel Iceta
• Santiago Ortiz
• Tom Steinberg

An excellent and useful summary of all the conference can be obtained form the official page.

6a CURSA DE MUNTANYA CASTELL DE BURRIAC “TROFEU PERE ASTURIANO” 1r CAMPIONAT DE CATALUNYA PER EQUIPS

El Grup de Muntanya d’Argentona organitza novament la Cursa de Muntanya Castell de Burriac Trofeu Pere Asturiano. Aquest any és la 6a edició.  Sense cap mena de dubte és una cursa exquisita, que gent com en Miquel Banchs, amb l’ajut de nombrossos socis i en especial en Joan Garcia,   han encertat en anar-la afinant fins trobar aquest punt d’excel.lència que l’ha convertit també en el 1er CAMPIONAT DE CATALUNYA PER EQUIP.

Però que sigui una prova puntuable pel campionat de Catalunya no ha de desanimar a esportistes amants de la muntanya a disfrutar-la.  Una cursa que transcorre per l’àrea protegida del Parc de la Serralada Litoral, a la comarca del Maresme, passant pels termes municipals i les poblacions d’Argentona i Cabrera de Mar.

La cursa serà el proper diumenge 23 de novembre de 2008, però ja podeu anar apuntant-vos per no quedar-vos sense poder disfrutar d’aquests 24 quilometres.

Per a les inscripcions i més informació podeu dirigir-vos a la pàgina web de la cursa.

Google is 10 years old this moth (or that is what they say!). In these years the company has developed from a small search tool only known to geeks (frikis in Spanish or Catalan at my Computer Science School in Barcelona ) to a technology giant becoming one of the most well known brands on the globe. One of the initiatives of Google for this celebration is the set of special articles “Google at 10” at the official Google Blog writen by relevant researchers in the IT area. In my opinion a very interesting articles to be read by my students. Try it!

• “The future of search“, por Marissa Mayer
• “Ad perfect“, por Susan Wojcicky
• “The social web: all about the small stuff“, por Joe Kraus
• “The future of online video“, por Chad Hurley
• “The intelligent cloud“, por Alfred Spector
• “The future of mobile“, por Andy Rubin
• “The democratization of data“, por Hal Varian
• “Building a future that’s clean and green“, por Bill Weihl
• “Wiping out the next smallpox“, por Larry Brilliant
• “The next Internet“, por Vinton Cerf

Last week Vicenç Beltran did the PhD presentation obtaining the maximum mark. The unstoppable growth of the World Wide Web requires a huge amount of computational resources that must be used efficiently. Nowadays, commodity hardware is the preferred platform to run web server systems because it is the most cost-effective solution. The work presented in this thesis aims to improve the efficiency of current web server systems, allowing the web servers to make the most of hardware resources. To this end, we first characterize current web server system and identify the problems that hinder web servers from providing an efficient resource utilization. From the study of web servers in a wide range of situations and environments, we have identified two main issues that prevents web servers systems from efficiently using current hardware resources. The first is the extension of the HTTP protocol to include connection persistence and security, which dramatically impacts the performance and configuration complexity of traditional multi-threaded web servers. The second is the memory-bounded or disk-bounded nature of some web workloads that prevents the full utilization of the abundant CPU resources available on current commodity hardware. We propose two novel techniques to overcome the main issues with current web server systems. Firstly, the Hybrid web server architecture that can be easily implemented in any multi-threaded web server to improve the CPU utilization with better management of client connections. And secondly, a main memory compression technique implemented in the Linux operating system that makes the most of current multiprocessor’s hardware to improve the performance of memory bounded web applications. The thesis work is supported by an exhaustive experimental evaluation that proves the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposals on actual systems. It is worth noting that the main concepts behind the Hybrid architecture have recently been implemented in popular web servers like Apache, Tomcat and Glassfish.

The work was coadvised by Eduard Ayguadé and myself. Congratulation to Vicenç for their excellent work.

Here you can find the PDF file of the PhD dissertation.